Ease of Accessibility

In the previous blog we discussed about responsiveness in design. Here we will be discussing about accessibility. As a designer you are not designing for a person but a diverse and dynamic set of users. A good designer will make sure his designs are easily accessible for a 10 year old to 70 year old.

For example we have always seen parents saying my 5 year old is tech savvy because they use a tablet to find their favourite cartoon videos. It is not really because the five year olds are tech savvy but the UI is much accessible. Without accessibility you are restricting yourself by building a ‘puzzle’ in front of the potential customer who wants to reach out to you.

Here’s how you can ensure accessibility of the UI easily:

Avoid image as Links

Using images as links is not SEO friendly practice. Google algorithm won’t read texts included in images. If you have business address make sure it is in text. Here is an example what to do and what not to.

Alt Text for images

Alternate text is how you describe an image for search engine as it cannot read text or identify the content in the image. Less images means faster webpages. Faster webpages means fast loading in mobile screens.

Monochrome settings

Designing in monochrome first helps you to focus on spacing and alignment more. After that add colours. Contrasting colour schemes are widely used. Check my colours is a web tool which analyses colour contrast in the websites.

Screen real estate

Screen estate basically refers to the area available to showcase the content. A good design uses screen estate efficiently. The balancing of content is important as it loads differently in different screens. Isolating important content and projecting them, it all depends on the screen estate. So distribution of content in the screen estate is vital for the accessibility of the UI design.

Isolate content

This came from print design world. In print design we use white space or negative space to project the content. Similarly isolating an important call to actions will give you more response rates. The above GIF is a scene from Stanley Kubrick movie The Shining, it shows a minimalistic frma where the director has used white space effectively.